Posts filed under ‘Master bedroom’

We finally moved into the house last Friday. I believe I got to the house at about 5am. I then waited for my parents to get there while my husband drove back to the city to wait for the movers. I tried, valiantly, to sleep on the floor upstairs while I waited but my cat wasn’t having it. She spent the next two hours howling at me and trying to shake the doors open. I should have taken that as a sign. Moving? Not fun. Hard. Very hard. Some day soon I’ll be able to talk about the layers upon layers of contact paper that I removed from the kitchen, but today is not that day. Instead, I’ll talk about the bedroom.

For the first two nights we were here, we slept on a mattress on the floor downstairs. You’d think it wouldn’t be all that cozy, but I guess when you’re that tired you can sleep anywhere. We finally ended up making our first trip to Ikea (we would make many, many, SO many more in the next week — thanks for not telling us WHAT PIECES WE REALLY NEEDED, IKEA!). Anyway, I was very pleased to see that they had the Malm bed in the elusive black-brown color. That’s what I had wanted originally (it’s option 4, but not in that color), but I’d heard that it was near impossible to find in that color anymore. If you found it, you were lucky. Luck was with us that day, because there it was! By the way, explaining Ikea to the uninitiated is next to impossible. No matter how much I had tried to brace my mother for the Ikea experience, nothing could have prepared her. I thought she would just drop dead when we entered the warehouse at the end. Even though I had warned her about how long it can take to make your way through, she kept repeating “how do we get out of here?”

After many days of putting together Ikea bedroom furniture (I think my husband could enter an Ikea-building contest. He built a drawer in 4 minutes — I timed him) we were able to make the leap from the mattress on the floor, to a mattress in an actual bed frame. Well, after a few more trips back to Ikea. If you ever buy an Ikea bed, be warned — you need a midbeam (they call it a hammar) and a slatted bed (if it’s a platform bed). Now, maybe this is something your average person knows? I wouldn’t think so, though, judging by the amount of glassy-eyed people crowded around the midbeams in the warehouse when I finally went back for it. I’ll skip over the part where I insisted that we should also use the box spring resulting in our struggling to get it through our archways and up the stairs for over an hour, realizing it looked ridiculous and that all our pushing and prodding had basically rendered it useless anyway and then consequently destroying it with a saw and hammer before bringing it back down and out to the trash pile. It’s something I’d really rather forget, frankly.

So, here it is with the bed and one of the dressers. I really can’t stand the way the blue wall color shows up in my pictures. It’s actually a much softer blue than this, but the images show it as being quite bright:

As you can see, we have absolutely nothing on the walls yet. We don’t even have our new blinds up, but there are only so many hours in the day and this is a start. The little light is one of two pretty lantern lights that we got at Ikea. They’re kind of similar to these as far as the glow they give off. You can’t tell by my ultra-bright pic, sadly. In reality, there’s actually very little light in the room right now — just two of these little lights.
The color of the walls is probably closer to the blue on the left side of the window here:

The bedding is from CB2 and has a similar vibe to the one I loved from Greener Grass Design. It’s very cozy. My cat finds it irresistible.

We closed on the house on Friday afternoon and started painting on Saturday morning. Our plan was to paint two rooms — our bedroom and the office. As we started up the stairs that morning my husband said “I think if we have time, we should just go ahead and paint the living room.” “Yeah, totally” I agreed. How wonderfully naive we both were.

Turns out, painting? Lots of work. And lots of time. And by the time you get to the 2nd night of painting, you’re dizzy from paint fumes and pretty much willing to sell your firstborn just to have someone finish the whole thing for you. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

My husband’s mother and stepdad (Eve and Keith) came up to help us paint. His stepdad has done a lot of painting and was able to tell us what we needed to buy at Home Depot. And we bought a LOT of stuff. You can see some of our supplies here (probably about a quarter of what we actually bought), including the wet vac my husband’s mom bought because she could no longer deal with the dust around the radiators:

Once we got started, Keith schooled us on the basics: washing the walls, filling the cracks, sanding the dried crack filler, taping, cutting in, etc. Being that I was mostly imagining myself rolling away at the walls all day, this was quite an education. Finally, they let me at the walls and I was very pleased:

It was during this initial rolling that Keith uttered the phrase that would get us through the rest of the weekend: “You’ll want it to look perfect, but it ain’t.” I think I repeated that to myself 20 times during the office painting alone.

An full 24 hours later and the bedroom was finally done. Well, except for the doors which we removed and will paint sometime next weekend.

Before:

After:

By the way, it’s kind of amazing that people just don’t bother removing the switch plates before painting, considering how easy it is. There was green paint all over those plates. Strange. Did I mention that there is a ceiling fan in every single room of the house? Including the bathroom? Yeah.

Next was the office. Eve and Keith left us alone for the office and who could blame them? Let’s face it, painting two rooms in one weekend is a bit like participating in some cruel experiment.

The office was a huge challenge. The walls were a mess and the ceiling was even worse. I think my husband spent 2 hours just filling cracks. There was also a wallpaper border at the top that was insanely difficult to remove. My triceps got the best workout ever while I was chipping away at that wallpaper. After all that, we did put primer on this room because of all the imperfections. Here’s the husband “cutting in”:

Before:

After:

Here’s the blackboard wall that’s going in the office. This is with only one coat (it takes four hours to dry between coats) so you can still see the primer and the pink peaking through:

There was just no way to finish this room. Not without jumping out the window anyway. So, we still have the trim to do, the doors, and another coat on the blackboard wall. But still, I’m pretty happy with the results in both rooms. Plus, I have a MUCH better idea of what goes into painting a room and will certainly never plan to do two rooms in one weekend ever again.

I still really disapprove of the name of this place. I didn’t see a SINGLE door for sale in there.

So, we checked out both beds that I had mentioned before — the solid and basic and the tranquility bed.

Neither one of us really cared for this one. Nothing offensive or displeasing about it, but it just didn’t do it for either of us.

You know, we actually did like the look of the Tranquility bed. I was a bit concerned about the drawers, but they were barely noticeable. I think I was picturing something like the bunk beds I remember my boy cousins having when I was a little kid, but the bed was pretty clean and not at all 8-year old boyish. I wasn’t really sure about the quality though. The one we were looking at had quite a few scratches and just generally looked beat up. I left feeling undecided.

We’re starting to reconsider (or, at least, I am) the lighter colored Ikea platform bed. I saw a version of it in a picture at Apartment Therapy (Jennie’s Retreat) and have been swayed a bit. The color looked really nice against her light pink walls and I’m thinking it might look just as nice against a light blue wall. Plus, there’s just something about the dark frame color against blue that is starting to seem a little overdone to me. It could be, though, that I’ve just been spending WAY too much time looking at bedrooms online.

Maybe it was Scrappy Girl’s post asking if a skirt with a tree design could be turned into a room, but I found myself checking out tree-themed textiles all day today. I love the colors in this room. I’d totally be into this look if I had, you know, floor to ceiling windows and owned absolutely nothing so as to insure this lovely spotless environment in my bedroom:

I love these pillows:
and this rug:
It’s all from Greener Grass Design and, in my fantasies, I’ve ordered one of each. Well, maybe more than one of the pillows.

We went back to Janovic this weekend (this time we went to the one on 86th street — much better) and picked up 2 samples to try out — a blue for our bedroom and dark grey (Deep Space) for my husband’s future office (where he will do much in the way of online game playing, but very little “office” type work). The blue was the “Old Blue Jeans” that I’ve posted about before. It looks like this on the Benjamin Moore site:

As you will see, did NOT look like that on our wall.

Old Blue Jeans was seriously dark. But, not as dark as the murky Deep Space. Now there’s a paint with a fitting name. We were thinking a dark grey would be good for his office since he’s planning on doing things like hanging a millennium falcon from the ceiling (Seriously. He has his own lightsaber — he means business.) So, I went back the next day and got some more samples: Rock Grey for the office, sheer romance for the bedroom and Misty Blue for the bedroom, as seen below:

The Misty Blue is just a bit too close to white, but I think Sheer Romance is lovely (cheesy name notwithstanding) and it matches the color I liked in Domino almost perfectly. Unfortunately, the colors look a little off in these photos and the Misty Blue looks similar to the Sheer Romance. Sheer Romance is actually just a bit darker than Misty Blue and is not as light as it looks in the pic. I think we may have a decision on the bedroom, but the jury is still out on the office color. Thank goodness for the Benjamin Moore samples. I would have been so depressed if we’d bought the original choices and painted the rooms with them. Can you imagine an office of Deep Space? Like a cave. But, not the fabulous Armani kind.

Walked home last night and happened to pass The Door Store. I spied a few beds inside and took a half a second to peer into the window. The store was already closed, but they had a few things that looked interesting. I’ve walked by The Door Store a hundred times, but why would I go into a store that, presumably, sells doors, if I was not in need of a door? Turns out, they sell more than just doors. They should think through that name choice, IMO. I have no idea if they have good furniture, but here are a couple of interesting options:

This bed is called “Solid and Basic”. Again, with the crappy naming.

This one, the Tranquility bed, looks okay, but I am really not crazy about the drawers. I’m going to check both of these out this weekend.

Here’s a bed that has nothing to do with what I want in my bedroom, but I love all the same:

So pretty and clean, but I really do think you’d need to keep your bedding all neatly tucked. I’m a big fan of Armani Casa. I saw him recently on some show talking about how he put together his dream bedroom and, I swear, he was living in what looked like a cave. But, you know what? It was the most beautiful damned cave you could imagine.